V▲LH▲LL
Skymningsdjur
Artoffact Records
Swedish duo V▲LH▲LL originally emerged as part of a wave of post-witchhouse bands in the early 2010’s, taking the esoteric and atmospheric elements of that genre and crossing it with broader industrial and darkwave sounds. In the years since they’ve distinguished their aesthetic, leaning hard on the Nordic pagan motifs suggested by their name, becoming more graspable and earthy, rooting their ghostly textures into more solid and developed songs. Their latest LP Skymningsdjur finds them revisiting some of their earliest motifs and ideas, and integrating still more new sounds into the mix.
One of V▲LH▲LL’s great strengths has always been in finding the balance between their electronic palette and their occult and fantastical subject matter. A song like “Hunger” shows how canny they are in doing so; violins and paired folky vocals floating in and around chiming synth-bells, flowing pads and fluttering hi-hat programming, sounding both traditional and modern, proximal and ghostly. It’s a vibe they can port through different styles, as with the synthwave adjacent “En Tid Om Ett Tag”, where pulsing bass and a jagged lead cut through the fog of reverb and delays, or the pounding “Calling for Storms”, whose melody and arrangement could port over easily into dark electro.
Still, for the band’s expertise in executing their sound, Skymningsdjur doesn’t have many truly standout cuts. To their credit everything on the record is at a minimum good, and expertly produced and performed, but its hard not to compare these cuts to earlier V▲LH▲LL songs in a similar vein. “Yuki-Onna” revisits the creepy faerie tale feel of songs like “Down in the Woods”, tossing in some tasteful gated guitar-sounds and some modular synth warbles, nicely done but less novel in this iteration. Closer “Devoured” revisits their earliest incarnation, thick with analogue bass and voices both distant and eerily close, lacking only a fresh hook to really put it over the top.
Thus Skymningsdjur falls into the territory of those catalogue albums that bring some new things to the longtable, but nothing that makes it particularly standout against their preceding LPs. It’s a band with a very defined sense of identity doing what they do, and doing it well, and to that end it can be a fine and enjoyable listen. Those seeking more of V▲LH▲LL’s brand of pagan electronics should be well pleased by it.
